Visiting a Patient

by Yongbo Ma

The clothes you’re wearing-are they your body or your soul?
you seem to have shrunk so much, yet we all pretend not to notice.
it’s as if your innate vitality is ebbing away, but perhaps
you’re casting off parts that belong only to the transient.

At first, the dawn left dust-like fingerprints on the glass,
then a name: you became someone—a middle stretch of a stream,
your voice carrying far across the plain,
the swollen water gives off an unspeakable fishy stench,
carrying along the way silt, foam, fish spittle,
urine of animals and humans, and a certain kind of duty –
in the outskirts of early spring, making a puddle deeper with watching.

The smile drawn on the kitchen’s white tile wall trickled down
and collapsed, that was the last century:
you simmered soup for us with old cucumber seeds and small seafood,
in this same once-grand old house.

“I really want to burn them all,” you said, your gaze indifferent
glancing over the walls lined with books and discs, as if your illness
stemmed from years of reading and love. You fell silent,
your closed eyelids concealed a creature’s tameness,
but more like an escape from some secret.

Half a white radish, said to fight cancer, still in your hand,
a double-way door still swaying slightly,
and that turn of spring and summer eighteen years ago
your smile that never paid the rent.